


Four Letter Word

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Category: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, I'm Sorry, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23790571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: It's August, 1966.
Relationships: Lenny Bruce (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)/Miriam "Midge" Maisel
Comments: 8
Kudos: 66





	Four Letter Word

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted as a tumblr prompt here: https://letmetellyouaboutmyfeels.tumblr.com/post/616120930825043968/its-pining-hours-6-for-lennymidge-all-i-can
> 
> Title is a reference to the eulogy posted about Lenny Bruce in Playboy Magazine, by Dick Schaap: "One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That's obscene."

In 1966, she gets two phone calls.

She gets a lot of other phone calls, of course. But these are the two she remembers.

The first one is in July. She’s on tour, her second in Europe. “You should come to Hollywood.”

“Lenny?” It’s… well, time differences are iffy but she’s pretty sure it’s about three in the morning in Los Angeles.

“Midge.” The way he says her name has always done something to her, sent a little fissure down her spine, but now that she knows what it sounds like right up against her ear, the hollow of her throat…

He’s got a girlfriend now, she reminds herself. Lotus, a comedian, a bright young thing almost half his age but hilarious, up and coming. Are they still dating? Are they engaged? She doesn’t know.

“Why should I come to Hollywood?” she asks, patiently.

“Because… you’d be good here.” There’s a long, long pause. “You’re good anywhere.”

The joke is obvious, but she’s not going to make it, because Lenny doesn’t sound… he sounds…

They never committed, never made promises, because she has two kids and that’s not who Lenny is and it’s not quite who she is and it was the right thing, the smart thing, to let it be something that just happened when it happened, when they found their ships passing each other in the same place on the same night. She _knows_ it was the right thing. And yet.

“When my tour’s finished,” she promises. “I’ll come out and I’ll see you. You can give me the grand tour.”

“I’ll take you to Canter’s.”

She doesn’t know what Canter’s is, but that doesn’t matter. “Every girl’s dream come true.”

The second phone call is in August.

She’s in London on the last leg, and her plan is to fly to New York to see her kids and sleep for a week before she heads out to Hollywood to see Lenny and seriously consider a few offers she’s been getting, and her hotel room phone rings in the dead of night.

The voice on the other end is young. “Mrs. Maisel?”

“Yes, this is she.” She sits up. She doesn’t know why but her stomach clenches and threatens to hurl. She hasn’t felt this way since her first hangover.

“I’m—I’m Marlene.”

She doesn’t recognize the name. The woman sounds like she’s crying. “I’m sorry, who?”

“Oh, um, sorry, most people know me by my stage name? Lotus, I’m Lotus. I’m sorry, Lenny talked about you a lot, he told me some things so I thought you should—you should know from me—I have to call a lot of people—”

For most people, stepping out on stage for the first time is terrifying. It’s a huge scaffold, and the audience is a gaping, cavernous maw that’s going to swallow you. Your legs are shaking like you’ve been electrocuted and your stomach has forgotten what gravity is.

Her first time on stage she was plastered as fuck so she never felt that. She never has. She was always too angry, too fired up, too out of her mind, to have the good sense to be scared.

But now… now she knows. This is how people feel when they step out for the first time. This is the fear they were always talking about.

Marlene, Lotus, is blowing her nose. “Um. It would mean a lot to him if you could come to the funeral, I’m—we’re going to have a big memorial later, but there’s going to be a small interment—at Eden Memorial—if you could—”

She’ll have to cancel. They’ll want to—they’ll need to—as soon as possible, that’s how it works, and she can’t ask them to delay a funeral for however many days so she can finish making people laugh.

She’s not sure she can make anyone laugh right now.

“I’ll be there.” Midge draws herself up. She knows, even if Marlene doesn’t, why he would want her to be there, and it’s not just so she can see him into the ground.

She was always the best at putting on a good show. Making everything look, seem, perfect.

Phil, a producer of some kind, meets her at the airport and takes her along. “I bought the negatives,” he tells her, quietly. She suspects he is not often quiet. “So the press wouldn’t get a hold of them.”

“Do they know…”

“How? Probably. You can’t stop people from talking.”

That was another reason why she hadn’t been able—they hadn’t been able—

“I told him that we could… that I could help him.”

Phil drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “That’s not how it works. It’s like a cancer. You’re always going to have it and there’s nothing that anyone can do to take it away. You have to find a way to live with it and fight that battle every day.”

It makes Lenny sound weak, and he wasn’t weak, not at all. But he was, Midge knows, a bit of a nihilist. He was fighting so many battles all the time, it makes sense that this was one last battle he just couldn’t manage.

“He was tired.” She knows that. He was so, so tired. Sometimes she feels just as tired.

Phil nods. “Yeah.”

Lotus is more self-contained than Midge expected, but she’s still only twenty-three and has no idea what to do about everything. And Midge knows—this is why she’s here. It reminds her, oddly, of a detective novel she picked up once. The man’s wife killed him, but with his dying breath he begged his lover to protect his wife. And the lover did.

So, too, does Midge.

She makes the calls and handles the family and gets the house cleaned. She helps plan the later memorial for August 21st, and puts out an advertisement in the papers. _Bring boxed lunches and noisemakers._ Ha. It’s what Lenny would really want.

If anyone is baffled by who she is, and what she’s doing here, nobody says anything. It’s not really the time to ask, is it? And she keeps herself composed, very, very composed, throughout the whole thing, because it’s not her job to do the wailing. She’s well aware of what her place is.

And at the end of all of it, she places a phone call of her own.

Benjamin clearly knows what this is about, because he takes her to a small, quiet park, one with lots of trees, and a few convenient benches.

“Do you remember when we saw him perform?” she asks, when she’s finished using up three handkerchiefs.

“Yeah.” There’s a pond, and Benjamin looks out over it. “He understood you. I like to think I did, too, a little bit, but he really did, didn’t he.”

She nods. And this is why she called him of all people because she did to Benjamin almost, not quite, what has just been done to her - up and vanished and left him wondering _why?_

“Whether you love something or not doesn’t decide whether you get to keep it,” Benjamin notes.

She wants to say you can’t keep something you never truly had in the first place, but he’s right, and she’s tired, and she’s used up three handkerchiefs, so instead she just lays her head on his shoulder and wishes, without guilt, that he was someone else.

**Author's Note:**

> The detective novel that Midge references is The Hollow by Agatha Christie.
> 
> Canter's is a historical Jewish deli in west Los Angeles.


End file.
